Friday, October 29, 2010

Introducing new ranking rules on FollowFriday.com

Today we are releasing a major update of FollowFriday.com. We continue to fight the spam on the #followfriday hashtag, so we are changing the ranking rules to reward those shoutouts which are more spontaneous. We are introducing a new points based algorithm where each followfriday recommendation is worth 50 points divided by the number of users recommended in that tweet. So if you receive a followfriday recommendation which only mentions you in the tweet, then you will get 50 points. If the tweet mentions 2 users you will each receive 25 points, and so on.

Points = 50 / (Number of mentions in the tweet)

As part of this new algorithm we have stopped taking into account retweets and thank you recommendations. In this way we don't value users who abuse these techniques.

We are also introducing a big infrastructure improvement which now allows us to calculate your exact position in the global ranking even if it exceeds 1000. So now our widgets have more sense and reflect your precise position.

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Why you should fill out your followfriday profile

FollowFriday.com has one of the biggest databases of active Twitter users (> 6 million and growing by 300,000 weekly). A good reason to update your profile is to appear correctly categorized and geolocated in our directory. When you appear in the correct country and language rankings it is a good opportunity for you to be followed by your country and city neighbors.

After you sign up on FollowFriday.com you can edit your country, city and language and you can also add 3 categories which complement your bio information. These categories are used by our search engine when someone searches by keywords. Once again it is another good opportunity to expose your profile and be found and followed by users of your sector.



The number of users who send followfriday shoutouts using our tools increases every week. For the last couple of weeks when you recommend someone using the “recommend” option we automatically complete the tweet with the user categories. This way your potential followers know your sector and interests which is good for both the recommender and the recommended.